Assembly and Deployment Toolkit

Welcome

This is the homepage of the CORBA Components Assembly and Deployment Toolkit. It supplements MicoCCM, the MICO CORBA Component Project, which implements the CORBA Components specification. The purpose of the Assembly and Deployment Toolkit is to ease the assembling of components and their deployment. It consists of two separate programs, the Assembly Tool and the Deployment Tool.

The Assembly Tool is a comfortable, GUI-based program that reads components from CORBA Software Packages. The components and their ports are then visualized and can be configured and interconnected with few mouse clicks. The complete assembly is then be packaged into an assembly archive.

The Deployment Tool is a console program that reads assembly archives and deploys them onto any target host where a MicoCCM Daemon is running - even over the network. It then establishes the connections and configurations you set in the Assembly Tool. Deployment can thus happen automatically.

Screenshot

The Assembly Tool configuring the Philosophers demo

Feature List

• Reads both CORBA Software Descriptor (.csd) files and CORBA Software Packages (.zip).

• Includes a Package Wizard to create a Software Package for your CORBA Component in case you don't yet have one.

• Arrange for homes, components and facets to be registered in the Naming Service.

• Configure initial values for home and component attributes.

• Configure connections between ports easily, using context menus that offer compatible ports only.

• Builds (and reads) CORBA Assembly Archive (.aar) files, or stores separate Assembly Descriptors (.cad).

• Software Packages and Assemblies can be read from a Web server, so you can deploy assemblies straight from a Web site.

• Uses OMG's XML-based file formats for storing meta information and the deployment architecture for installation and deployment.

• Cross-platform; both Assembly and Deployment Tool are available for Unix and Windows.

Download

You can download the Assembly and Deployment Toolkit in a Unix or in a Windows version.

In either case, you need a working installation of MicoCCM to make use of both tools.

Unix

Download the Unix version as ccmtool-1.0.tar.gz (460 kB).

The following third-party packages are required on Unix. Please check your system; these are fairly common packages, and they might already be available. If not, please download and install them before running the Assembly and Deployment Toolkit.

• Tcl/Tk, version 8.3 or above.
• [incr Tcl], version 3.0 or above.
• Zip
• Unzip.

Windows

Download the Windows version (Windows 95 and above) as ccmtool.zip (3168 kB).

This is a self-contained package that contains freestanding versions of both tools as well as a copy of Info-Zip's zip and unzip tools.

To install, use any unzip program (e.g. WinZip), and extract the package's contents into a new directory.

Dependencies

The Assembly and Deployment Toolkit depend on a number of pieces of Open Source software to do their job. The following list is for informational purposes only; these packages are included in the distribution, you don't need to download any of them. Think of this as the "credits" section.

• Tcl/Tk has already been mentioned above; Tcl is a powerful and easily learnable cross-platform scripting language, Tk is the associated graphical toolkit.
• BWidget provides many useful widgets (originally contributed by Unifix).
• Steve Balls' TclXML and TclDOM provide the XML support.
• Cameron Laird's XML Pretty Printer is used so that output files are human readable.
• Combat is used to communicate with the Interface Repository and the MicoCCM Daemon.
• Michael McLennan's [incr Tcl] provides the object system that Combat uses. Alternatively, Matt Newman's Tcl++ (same URL) can be used, and in fact is used in the Windows distribution.
• Richard Hipp's Tkhtml widget can optionally be used to display HTML help files instead of the text version.
• Jeffrey Hobbs' tkcon was used for interactive debugging.
• Dennis LaBelle's freeWrap was used to build the Windows binaries.

License

The Assembly and Deployment Toolkit is distributed under the GPL license. Please read the file LICENSE that is included in the distribution.